Snapshots of happiness from the 1960s and 1970s
by David Ford
In the second essay in this series, David Ford looks at personal snapshots of nightlife from the 1960s and 1970s. What happened when people started to take their own photographs of their social life? How did it change the look and feel of the photographs and the way in which people were depicted?
Christmas photograph, 1960s, photographer unknown
What is captivating about this picture is the way the woman is laughing, with her head flung back and her eyes closed. She is laughing as if nobody is watching. We want photographs to capture our happiest moments and this picture does it perfectly. The couple stand next to a Christmas tree with drinks in their hands. He is smiling at the camera but she is lost in laughter, perhaps because of a joke he has just told. The picture feels fresh and spontaneous and the person who took it knew the couple well enough for them to act without inhibition. The anonymous amateur photographer, the intimate social situation and the casual composition of this picture are characteristic of the changes to vernacular nightlife photography that emerged in the middle of the 1960s with the arrival of cheap film and easy to use cameras.
Until then the only nightlife photographs most people owned were those taken by a commercial photographer working in a bar, restaurant or nightclub (see the first essay here)1. They were ‘good’ photographs; in focus and well-lit; composed with the sitters in the centre of the picture. These black and white photographs are evocative of the period but they use a limited number of poses and lack any emotional investment from the photographer so they can sometimes feel a little formal and stiff.
May 1967, photographer unknown
By the middle of the 1960s this had changed. People were more affluent and had more leisure time. Mass ownership of cheap, automated cameras and quick High Street processing meant everybody could now be a photographer. Photography became a truly democratic art and this revolution in popular photography changed both what was photographed and how the images looked.2
Snapshot on Kodak paper, 1970s, photographer unknown
One change was that people took more pictures of their social lives.3 Cameras with plastic components and a built-in flash were small and light enough to fit into a pocket or handbag. With a camera always available and photographs being easy to take and cheap to process, you no longer needed to wait for the perfect shot or worry about taking too many pictures. This led to the devaluation of personal photographs. When you owned only a handful of photographs they were precious, when you had hundreds they became mere snapshots4, things to be thrown in a box under the bed rather than mounted in frames or albums.
Snapshot on Kodak paper, 1970s, photographer unknown
Snapshot, 1970s, photographer unknown
You could now take photographs indoors and in poor light so you could capture parties and celebrations at home as well as nights out in bars and clubs. People act differently in private and with family and friends and personal snapshots became more candid. But not too candid. Although this is a purely adult world, and the people in them have often been drinking, most of the pictures remain rather tame. Perhaps people were concerned about what the film processor would think5 or they just did not want to be reminded of their more outrageous actions and self-censored the pictures.
Snapshot, 1970s, photographer unknown
Kodacolor print, April 1966, photographer unknown
Another change was the way in which men and women are depicted. The photographer was one of them and had no agenda. Men and women are presented, not as objects of curiosity, but as real, ordinary, people. These are tender and affectionate portraits of friends.
Here we see men revelling in the company of other men. The ties have come off. They embrace, drink, smoke, even hold hands. The pictures present a positive image of male friendship and the need men have to belong to a group.
Snapshot on Kodak paper, 1970s, photographer unknown
Snapshot, August 1971, photographer unknown
Snapshot, early 1960s, photographer unknown
In the 1950s, public bars (in the UK at least) were largely a male preserve. Things began to change in the 1960s but most female-only socialising still took place in domestic settings. The women now wear jumpers and jeans as well as dresses. These photographs show women drinking and enjoying themselves without men. They are relaxed and confident. Here friendship is a space where they can be free.
Snapshot, 1970s, photographer unknown
Snapshot on Kodak paper, 1970s, photographer unknown
The photographer was now taking the picture to capture their own social experience and they bring a greater emotional involvement to the process. The snapshot becomes an act of communication between friends with the photographer joining in the fun as the shutter is pressed.
Snapshot of dancers, photographer unknown
Snapshot, July 1968, United Kingdom, photographer unknown
Colour was the most obvious change in the physical qualities of the pictures. Colour film only became affordable and widely available in the middle of the 1960s. The sudden explosion of colour photography could be seen as a reaction to the drab post war years of the 1940s and '50s. The sixties were the age of pop art and pop music, of growing affluence and optimism and only colour could truly reflect the times. In these nighttime snapshots, the colours are as bold and bright as the music that would have played in the background.
Instamatic, February 1973, photographer unknown
But there are other elements to the snapshot style. The pictures feel more spontaneous and personal; less ‘cold.’ They are private pictures; the visual equivalent of peering into somebody’s diary. The people in them pose differently than they would for a professional so not everyone is smiling or even aware the picture is being taken. Because the photographer is untrained and taking the photograph purely to remember a night out6, they are less concerned with taking a ‘good’ picture. This means the results can sometimes be out of focus, overexposed, or taken too close or too far away. This uncomposed look with its odd angles and juxtapositions, its accidents and chance elements, its glaring use of flash, often feels closer to our actual experience of an alcohol blurred night out than a more formal photograph would.
Snapshot on Kodak paper, photographer unknown
The photographer most often associated with this snapshot aesthetic is Nan Goldin.7 Her pictures from the 1970s and 80s of nightlife in Boston, London and New York have the spontaneous feel of snapshots. They have the same use of flash and saturated colours and seemingly casual composition. Like most amateur snapshots, they have a private, diaristic quality – these are personal pictures of her extended family of friends and she invests them with great emotional power. But from the beginning she wanted more than a simple record of a night out. Her pictures are deliberately artless in style but not in intention. They are the result of a rigorous editing process and are meant to be seen in series, originally as slide shows accompanied by music. Her pictures subvert stereotyped gender roles but they are far more explicit than most amateur snapshots and cover a much wider range of emotional situations.
It is a frequently repeated belief that when a house is burning down people will rescue their pets and their photographs. Even the most banal snapshot can have meaning for its owner because they add what is not in the picture; the memory of when and where it was taken. Personal photographs are a proxy for memory and what makes them valuable to their owners is the occasion they evoke rather than any visual qualities they possess. When the photograph no longer belongs to the person who took it, or the person in it, this ‘ownership’ of the event depicted is lost. The thing that made the object powerful – its ability to invoke a particular person, time, or place – no longer exists.
Polaroid, 1970s, photographer unknown
So why do we still find these snapshots so appealing? Photographs of people enjoying themselves have an intrinsic interest. We are drawn to the subject matter and naturally curious about who they are and what they are doing. Perhaps it is also a nostalgia for a past that we imagine was somehow simpler and more carefree. These pictures are now fifty or sixty years old so they record a period before most of us were born. Or maybe it is something about the physical qualities of the pictures themselves that we find attractive – the Kodachrome colours, the vintage interiors and clothes, the square format that fits snuggly into the palm of a hand. Or is it because, as viewers, we become participants in the long-forgotten party, a guest at the drunken celebration. Maybe that is our hand reaching into the picture, our foot the dancer is tripping over, our shadow looming in the background.
Snapshot on Kodak paper, 1960s, photographer unknown
Personal snapshots record the human search for enjoyment and excitement in social activities. They force you to accept that this happiness once existed.8 The saddest photographs are often those of our happiest times because we know that those times are gone forever. So perhaps these pictures act as a kind of memento mori, reminding us that all happiness is fleeting and cannot be repeated.9 In the end, these photographs may be the only evidence that remains of those nights when the people in them were most fully alive.
In the final essay of the series , David Ford will look at older examples of vernacular nightlife photography and consider how developments in photographic technology reflected the desire to record our nighttime experiences.
David Ford is a writer and artist based in London. He has been a collector of vernacular photography for over twenty years. His first essay in this series, Who Are These People Who Inhabit This Nocturnal World?, can be read here.
[1] Personal cameras before the 1960s could only be used effectively outside, in daylight, and required some technical knowledge to use properly. The cost of developing film was high. Therefore amateur photographers tended not to take pictures of their nights out.
[2] People still used professional photographers for important events such as weddings, anniversaries and graduations, though they would take personal pictures to supplement the more formal ones.
[3] Although these remain a tiny proportion of domestic photographs.
[4] Snapshot is often used as a derogatory term but it is more usefully defined in relation to intention rather than quality. ‘The fundamental characteristic of the snapshot is that it is a ‘naïve’ document, motivated solely by a personal desire to create a photographic record of a person, place or event and with no artistic pretensions or commercial considerations’ Editor Robert Lenman, The Oxford Companion to the Photograph, Oxford University Press, 2005, page 582
[5] This was not true of Polaroid cameras but these were not as widespread as other point and shoot cameras.
[6] Or to forget. ‘The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.’ John Berger, Understanding a Photograph, Penguin, London, 2013, page 55.
[7]‘My work originally came out of the snapshot aesthetic… snapshots are taken out of love and to remember people, places and shared times.’ Nan Goldin quoted in Gerry Badger, The Genius of Photography, Quadrille, London, 2007, page 198.
[8] This is Barthes noeme. ‘The noeme of Photography is simple, banal; no depth: “that has been”. Roland Barthes(translated Richard Howard), Camera Lucida, Hill and Wang, New York, 1981, page 115.
[9] John Berger said photographs are ‘a memento from a life being lived.’, Understanding a Photograph, Penguin, London, 2013, page 53.
